Matt Peckham

Matt Peckham

Matt Peckham writes about games and general technology for TIME. His work has appeared in Variety, WIRED, The Washington Post, ABC News and others. He has an M.A. in English from Creighton University and lives in Michigan. Drop him a line here.

Whenever I think about Windows 10, I hear Russell Watson belting the Star Trek: Enterprise theme song: “It’s been a long road, getting from there to here…” The muchballyhooed new iteration of Microsoft’s flagship operating system is indeed here, available July 29 for anyone bold enough to make the leap.

It’s a compelling proposition on paper: A free upgrade for anyone running Windows 7 or 8, and an interface overhaul rife with snazzy new features and tantalizing curiosities, many of them aimed squarely at gamers.

I use Windows for high-end PC gaming and that’s it. If you share that conception of Windows — as the beating heart of a souped up, console-shaming, uber-gaming powerhouse — you’re in good company.

But should gamers upgrade right away? To break that down and explore some of the less well-known angles, I spoke with Stardock CEO (and Windows insider) Brad Wardell, the guy behind recent PC games like Galactic Civilizations III and Sorcerer King, as well as up and comers Offworld Trading Company, Ashes of the Singularity and Servo. Here’s what he told me.

The number one reason gamers should consider Windows 10

DirectX is how games talk to your computer, the crucial “application programming interface” that rests like a byzantine traffic signal between the way a studio wants a game to look and play and the hardware under the hood. DirectX has been with us since Windows 95, and Wardell says DirectX 12, the dozenth iteration of the toolset, is as crucial a rethink as Windows 95 itself was when it debuted two decades ago.

“DirectX 11 and before were all made before we had multicore CPUs,” say Wardell. “So at the end of the day, all your games were talking to your video card via one core.” That, for modern CPUs now readily sporting four, six or eight cores, creates an enormous bottleneck. However fast your video card might be, that single-core limitation means games often wind up log-jammed by the CPU. It’s a head-scratcher Wardell says Microsoft’s finally solved with DirectX 12.

“In DirectX 12, every single one of your cores can talk to your graphics card simultaneously,” says Wardell. “So in our benchmarks, going from DirectX 11-optimized games, we’re seeing between 85% and 300% performance boosts.” Those kinds of leaps, any way you want to slice them, are huge.

Mind you, the game has to be written for DirectX 12, something you won’t see much of as Windows 10 launches. In fact Wardell believes his upcoming Kurzweilian homage, Ashes of the Singularity, a real-time strategy game and potential genre-upender that can juggle thousands of units simultaneously, will be the first. It’s due to be playable via Steam Early Access next month (It’s also, incidentally, the first game with a DirectX 12 benchmark, adds Wardell.)

But it’ll likely have company very soon. Wardell says it’s “not hard” to go to DirectX 12, and that his developers made the shift with relative ease. “These high-end games, like Unreal Engine or CryEngine, you know, your first-person shooters and such, they will probably have DirectX 12 versions very shortly. And when they arrive, we’re talking about a pretty huge, instantaneous performance boost.”

The older your system, the more DirectX 12 matters

It sounds counterintuitive, but Wardell told me the performance gains with DirectX 12 will be greater the slower your CPU is. That, to put it simply, is just a reflection of how big a deal activating all those idle cores turns out to be.

“The older your box, the better Windows 10 is,” says Wardell. “So if you have like a Core i5 [Intel’s mid-range CPU series] with a decent video card, you’ll actually see a bigger gain than if you have some monster Core i7 high-end CPU.”

Again, the game has to be DirectX 12 aware to benefit, but it’s a fascinating, hugely ironic Windows 10 wrinkle that its chief beneficiaries may be gamers running older multicore hardware.

DirectX 12 uses a lot less power

“Because it’s using all your cores, DirectX 12 uses a lot less power,” says Wardell. “Whenever you max out a core, you’re using a lot more power overall than if you’re distributing the load across multiple cores. So that means big power savings, especially for laptop gamers where battery life becomes a vital factor.”

The unanticipated flip side of this, Wardell tells me, is that DirectX 12’s core repurposing could actually harm extreme-end overclocked PCs. “Here’s a sneak preview of the first scandal,” jokes Wardell. “All these people who overclocked their machines could in theory wind up frying their computers, because with all those cores going all out, your PC’s going to run way hotter.”

Windows 10 turns your single video card PC into a twofer

How many video cards do you have in your PC? Think carefully (I didn’t, and told Wardell, who asked me the same question, just one). Wardell reminded me most modern PCs have at least two (not counting extremely high-end systems with cards run in tandem, in which case the number would be three or more).

“Everyone forgets about the integrated graphics card on the motherboard that you’d never use for gaming if you have a dedicated video card,” says Wardell. “With DirectX 12, you can fold in that integrated card as a seamless coprocessor. The game doesn’t have to do anything special, save support DirectX 12 and have that feature enabled. As a developer I don’t have to figure out which thing goes to what card, I just turn it on and DirectX 12 takes care of it.”

Wardell notes the performance boost from pulling in the integrated video card is going to be heavily dependent on the specific combination—the performance gap between integrated video cards over the past half-decade isn’t small—but at the high end, he says it could be as significant as DirectX 12’s ability to tap the idle cores in your CPU. Add the one on top of the other and, if he’s right, the shift at a developmental level starts to sound like that rare confluence of evolutionary plus the letter ‘r’.

DirectX 12’s benefits are going to be greater for PCs than consoles

Microsoft’s Xbox One is supposed to get Windows 10 at some point yet this year, but Wardell says DirectX 12’s benefits are mostly PC-centric. “This is going to make the PC pull away from the consoles quite a bit,” says Wardell. “It’s not that Windows 10 is so great, by the way, but that Windows 8 and below were nerfed. When the benchmarks start showing up in a week or so, it’s going to be so extreme, I think a lot of people are going to think they’re fake.”

It boots much faster than Windows 7

Windows 8 gamers—the small percentage who made that leap, anyway (Wardell says it’s around 23%)—you can just skip this one, because you’re already enjoying lightning-fast Windows boot times. But if you’ve been living on Windows 7 all this time, Windows 10’s startup times are slightly faster than Windows 8’s, and dramatically faster than Windows 7’s.

It handles windowed gaming much better than Windows 7

In the old days, PC games ran full screen or bust. Attempts to allow windowed gaming were slow or outright glitchy. Not so in Windows 8, and now, for those who’ve been biding their time running Windows 7, Windows 10.

“One of the things that’s a little subtle and not super-sexy, but I care about it, is that with Windows 10, and this is also a Windows 8 thing, you can run your game in a window and enjoy it with full performance,” says Wardell. “That’s a big deal for me, because let’s say I’m playing a game that’s not an action game, I can run the game as a full-screen window and just alt-tab and just instantaneously you’re on the desktop.”

You can stream Xbox One games to Windows 10 PCs

This one works day one, letting you pipe Xbox One games to a Windows 10 PC using Microsoft’s new game streaming technology (and also, like the Xbox One, capture your gameplay DVR-style in compatible games, then upload it to video sharing sites). Microsoft has also announced it’s working on the reverse, letting gamers stream PC games to the Xbox One console.

“I would totally be into that,” says Wardell. “I mean can you imagine what Fallout 4 for the PC is going to look like? Assuming [Fallout 4 developer] Bethesda doesn’t intentionally nerf it, the difference between the PC and console versions should be massive.”

You can see all your Xbox Live stuff

I have mixed feelings about this as a reason to upgrade, because it’s really just a social networking add-on: the option to scan your Xbox Live profile, gamerscore, achievements and so forth using the new Windows 10 Xbox Live app, as well as chat with your Xbox Live friends from your Windows 10 PC.

The downer, at least for me, is that it reinforces the distance Microsoft’s fallen from its lofty, now bygone Games for Windows push, back when the company boldly aspired to merge its Windows and Xbox ecosystems. Steam, at this point synonymous with PC gaming, pretty much eliminated hopes of Windows games feeding achievement stacks and gamerscores. Windows 10’s arms-around-the-Xbox-One strategy is still, in the end, about peering into the latter’s vibrant ecosystem from the outside.

It’s free

I’ve saved the most obvious and broadly hyped perk for last: If you own Windows 7 or Windows 8, upgrade versions or full, you can pick up Windows 10 for nada, so long as you do so by the end of July 2016 (it’s free to Windows 7 and 8 users for one year, in other words).

5 Reasons to Buy a PlayStation 4 Right Now

Bloomberg—Getty ImagesA logo sits on the front of a Sony PlayStation 4 (PS4) games console, manufactured by Sony Corp., in this arranged photograph taken in London, U.K., on Friday, Nov. 15, 2013.

To date, it's the fastest selling game system in history

On the sales front, the PlayStation 4 rules the roost. Sony’s flagship game console pulled off a high octane launch in late 2013, and it’s since beat both Nintendo’s Wii U and Microsoft’s Xbox One in global systems sold.

It also looks nothing like a first-gen console, designed by architect Mark Cerny to resemble the sort of quiet, elegantly slimline revision we’re more likely to see three or four years into a console’s 10-or-so year lifespan. And that’s without trading down, power-wise.

Here’s a roundup of reasons to consider buying the PlayStation 4, mid-2015 edition:

It has the best versions of cross-platform games

This applies more to earlier games than recent ones, but on balance, cross-platform titles tend to look better on Sony’s hardware. That’s because third-party studios struggled out of the gate to optimize for the Xbox One’s architecture, running into performance snafus that forced them to make visual compromises. If you’re a strict videophile who pores over graphics comparisons at pixel-scrutinizing sites like Digital Foundry, the PlayStation 4 brooks little argument here.

Popularity

Everyone not tied down by a massive exclusivity deal wants to be on Sony’s hardware. It’s snowball math: the more people buy a game console, the more studios want to develop for it, the more people buy the game console. Sony’s PlayStation 4 soared past 22 million units sold in March—more than twice the Xbox One’s last reported “shipped” figure—and it’s either close behind or in lockstep with Nintendo’s original Wii for the honorific “fastest selling console of all time.” If you want the near-future-proofed game console, it’s the PlayStation 4 by a country mile.

Bloodborne

One of the finest action roleplaying games ever made lives on Sony’s system and no other. Its outrageous challenges and endless combat loops won’t resonate with everyone, but if you’re an aficionado of studio From Software’s Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls games, the PlayStation 4 is a slam dunk buy for Bloodborne alone.

Share Play

Both Sony and Microsoft let you stream video of what you’re doing through services like Twitch, but only the PlayStation 4 lets you invite viewers (who also have a PlayStation 4) to play games you own but that they don’t. Before you shrug because you and your friends are going to buy the same games, consider the “remote assistance” feature, which, if you’re stuck in whatever game, lets you turn control over to a remote player, either in an instructional capacity or to simply get you over the hump.

PlayStation Now

Sony’s game-streaming technology isn’t the same thing as true backward compatibility, and game streaming can be visually glitchy if your Internet connection hiccups. But since older PlayStation 3 games look diminished on native 1080p resolution TV screens, does it matter? For $20 a month, PlayStation Now gives you unfetteredun access to over 100 PlayStation 3 games, and the list is growing.

It’s like soccer with race cars. That’s the elevator pitch for San Diego studio Psyonix’s Rocket League, a zany ball-punching demolition derby for PC and PlayStation 4. The game arrived without ceremony two weeks ago, but it’s already clinched over 5,000 “overwhelmingly positive” reviews on Steam. It’s now pretty much what everyone’s talking about.

Imagine Hot Wheels with something like Moon-gravity physics: swarms of splashy, customizable rocket-propelled dragsters that can leap into the air like tumbling ultralights. Players scoot or soar over futuristic astroturf fields honeycombed in weird symbology and enclosed within translucent hexagonal domes. The goal: to chase down a gargantuan ball (bigger than the vehicles themselves) and send it careening into soccer-style goal posts. And like soccer, it’s all about finessing assists and saves, but with a kind of outré elegance that’s like watching four-wheeled ballet dancers glide, plummet and pirouette.

It’s weird, no doubt about it, and at first tends to play as bizarrely as it sounds. Figuring out how to best avail yourself of subtle variations in vehicle mass and momentum becomes as essential as sussing the statistical differences between top footballers in FIFA 15. But once you get the hang of the controls—and you will, it’s just a matter of your brain doing that thing brains do when recalibrating to alt-gravity physics—it becomes second nature. Stunts that look impossible in clips, say leaping into the air, rebounding off the dome and arrowing across the field, then flipping your hind end around at the last minute to smack the ball as it crosscuts your trajectory and score a goal, become eminently possible.

Rocket League, it’s worth mentioning, is a kind of sequel to a 2008 game clumsily titled Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars. But the latter was only available for PlayStation 3, and didn’t generate the critical buzz Rocket League‘s been getting. What’s more, Rocket League supports cross-platform play, allowing PlayStation 4 and Windows players to square off across ecosystems.

Think of it as football unbound, and another example of the power of games to bring totally ridiculous ideas (that turn out to be pretty darned good ones) to life.

5 Reasons to Buy the Xbox One Right Now

AFP—AFP/Getty ImagesA member of the Microsoft security team watches over the newly unveiled Xbox One videogame console at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington, on May 21, 2013.

You love Halo, don't you?

It’s axiomatic to the game console wars that a vocal minority will forever turn the “which to buy” debate into a fracas over technical exotica. Microsoft’s Xbox One has suffered more than Sony’s PlayStation 4 in this regard, struggling to hit today’s high-def sweet spot (1o80p) in faceoffs with its more popular rival. It hasn’t helped that the Xbox One looks like a kludgy 1980s desktop computer, a throwback to boxy “kitchen sink” power design.

But on balance, the Xbox One remains a fine choice in 2015, flush with outstanding exclusives, a lower price tag and increasingly close integration with Microsoft’s ubiquitous Windows ecosystem. And those first-gen disparities between the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 have dwindled as development’s matured, proving both systems are well-matched powerhouses in the hands of experts.

Here’s a roundup of reasons to consider the Xbox One, mid-2015 edition.

Halo 5: Guardians

The only place to play the fifth installment in Microsoft’s storied sci-fi Halo series is the Xbox One. Halo 5: Guardians arrives October 27—a week earlier for Limited Collector’s Edition buyers. And if you want to replay the first four games remastered for Xbox One, the Halo Master Chief Collection, whose online features were still in triage through the early part of this year, looks to finally be in solid shape.

Beyond Halo? Formidable Xbox One exclusives out now or coming this year include Sunset Overdrive, Ori and the Blind Forest, Cuphead, Titanfall, Rise of the Tomb Raider and Forza Motorsport 6.

Your friends play on Xbox Live

Social networks are the future of any online-focused platform. No one save Sony and Microsoft have the hard statistical data accounting for who played what, where and how often on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, but if your friends mostly live on Xbox Live, abandoning your pals to play with strangers may be out of the question. (Note that Xbox Live runs $60 a year, and it’s mandatory if you want to play games or do much of anything else with the Xbox One online.)

You can stream Xbox One games to a Windows 10 PC

You’ll need a Windows 10 computer, of course, but if you already have a prerelease version of the operating system (or plan to get one when the public version of Windows 10 arrives on July 29) and you like the idea of cordless platform interoperability, this slick little bonus feature just emerged from beta.

Sidebar: Microsoft plans to reintroduce cross-platform gaming (Xbox One and Windows 10 PCs) with Fable Legends later this year. And Windows 10 will itself soon replace the Xbox One’s native operating system as part of Microsoft’s ongoing OS unification strategy.

It’s cheaper than Sony’s PlayStation 4

By only $50 ($350 versus $400), sure. But that’s more than the price of a used game and nearly the price of a new one. If you want the least expensive game console, that’s technically Nintendo’s Wii U. But if you want the least expensive (upfront) platform that plays third-party games like Grand Theft Auto V, The Witcher 3 and Batman: Arkham Knight, the Xbox One wins the price tag war — for now.

Backward compatibility

Console-makers are under no obligation to retrofit their flagship systems with prior-gen titles, but when they do, no one’s going to complain. The Xbox 360 has a powerful back library well worth preserving. The initial list of backward compatible games (in beta, as part of the Xbox One preview program) may look small, but expect it to grow, and anything that made piles of cash to appear on it eventually.

To be clear, if you’re looking for a video game system that plays stuff like Grand Theft Auto V, The Witcher 3 or Batman: Arkham Knight, the Wii U isn’t for you. For one reason or another, Nintendo’s quirky, quasi-portable, dual-screen, trend-bucking system failed to clinch crucial third-party support, and thus lacks many of the current generation’s third-party blockbusters.

But likewise, if you want a system that plays games made by Nintendo, including those starring icons like Mario, Donkey Kong, Kirby or Zelda’s Link, the Wii U is pretty much a slam dunk, sluggish sales or no.

The games coming this year

We lost The Legend of Zelda—originally due this year—to 2016, but the Wii U’s fall and holiday lineup still has its share of titans, including Super Mario Maker (a toolset that lets you create and share 2D Super Mario Bros. levels in retro 8-bit or contemporary 3D styles), Yoshi’s Woolly World (a sidescrolling platformer staged in levels made entirely of yarn and cloth), Star Fox Zero (the sixth installment in Nintendo’s sci-fi shooter series, and the first in nine years), Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash (the most cathartic tennis series on the planet) and Xenoblade Chronicles X (a sci-fi roleplaying game and spiritual sequel to the superlative Xenoblade Chronicles for Wii that could more than make up for Zelda‘s absence).

It has Amiibo, the Virtual Console and Wii backward-compatibility

The Wii U plays Wii U games, but also the entire Wii library (over 1,000 and counting), as well as NES and Super NES classics via the Virtual Console, from Super Metroid to F-Zero and Earthbound to Super Mario Bros. 3. And it shares Nintendo’s programmable Amiibo figurines with the Nintendo 3DS and uses them in ways no other toy-game vendor does, with uniquely tailored inbuilt support across multiple Nintendo titles instead of a single franchise.

You have children old enough to play games

Sony and Microsoft’s systems aren’t totally bereft of games both thematically and creatively aimed at younger players, but they’re pretty wanting. The Wii U is basically the inverse of that, though one of Nintendo’s hallmarks is crafting experiences that transcend demographic boundaries, meaning the system’s age-related floor is much lower, but its ceiling no less high.

It’s still less expensive than Sony or Microsoft’s systems

And it may wind up cheaper still if we see a late 2015 price drop (I’d argue it’s long overdue). But even without one, the Wii U remains the cheapest current-gen console on the block. You can grab a 32 GB model with various bundle options for $300—$50 less than Microsoft’s Xbox One and $100 less than Sony’s PlayStation 4.

Satoru Iwata

Nintendo chief

“Above all, video games are meant to be just one thing: fun.” So said Nintendo president and CEO Satoru Iwata in 2006. The playful Japanese game designer, who died July 11 at 55, was that rarest of confluences in the business world: a corporate leader with bona fide creative experience. …

Read Satoru Iwata’s Unpublished Quotes From TIME’s Interview

The rest of Satoru Iwata's answers to questions posed in a broad-ranging March 2015 interview, and his last with a Western media outlet.

+ READ ARTICLE

At just 55—a year younger than Apple’s Steve Jobs when he passed in 2011—Nintendo CEO and president Satoru Iwata has left us too soon. With his passing, the world of and beyond the games industry has lost a visionary leader and creative giant.

“Mr. Iwata is gone, but it will be years before his impact on both Nintendo and the full video game industry will be fully appreciated,” said Nintendo of America President and COO Reggie Fils-Aimé in a statement Monday morning. “He was a strong leader for our company, and his attributes were clear to most everyone: Intelligence, creativity, curiosity and sense of humor. But for those of us fortunate enough to work closely with him, what will be remembered most were his mentorship and, especially, his friendship. He was a wonderful man. He always challenged us to push forward…to try the new…to upset paradigms—and most of all, to engage, excite and endear our fans. That work will continue uninterrupted.”

I spoke with Mr. Iwata in March for a TIME story about Nintendo’s plans to reinvent itself amid struggling sales, but I had to leave much of the interview out. Here are the rest of Iwata’s answers to my questions, in a dialogue that included his reflections on the evolution of digital content, the importance of multigenerational design and his thoughts on the responsibilities of a company obsessed with surprising (without alienating) consumers.

Note: A few of these answers were previously published in shorter form. I believe the complete versions offer broader insight into Iwata’s philosophies and personal style, and so I’ve included the full versions here.

On his desire to engage with Nintendo fans in unique ways

“I think a typical president of a company does not do things like Iwata Asks or Nintendo Direct, so some people might view me as a slightly strange president. But I do think that there is a tremendous amount of meaning for me to be able to do and continue to do things that only I can do, and so I’ll continue to look for new and unique things that I can contribute.”

On the value of content in a rapidly digitizing world

“We’ve seen dramatic changes to things like music and videos in terms of how they are shared over the last 10 years. And I think certainly we’ve seen it become much more convenient. But as a content industry, I think there are questions as to whether or not they’ve managed to sustain and maintain the value of that content. For example, an artist who once used to be able to sell millions of copies of CDs in the previous model, now they are not selling as many copies of their albums digitally, and the questions is if, as a content creator, they’ve been able to sustain that level of income and revenue in the new model, and I think that there’s questions as to whether or not the content creators have been able to.”

“The digital world is one that has sort of a unique characteristic, where it’s a place in which it’s very easy for the value of content to fall. In the music industry, for the artists who are not able to gather as large of an audience for live performance, they’re finding that they’re not able to achieve as rewarding of an outcome for their content creation. Similarly if you were to speak with movie producers they would have said in the past that DVDs were a very important revenue stream for their business model, but now what we’re seeing is that DVD sales are to achieving sales at the levels they once did and primarily that’s because now there are so many different video streaming services where you’re paying just a few dollars a month and you have access to tens of thousands of different movies that you can stream on demand.”

“And so what we have spent a tremendous amount of time thinking deeply about is, how do we as a content creator who is making games that we are spending tremendous amounts of resources to craft into these experiences that consumers can enjoy and find value in, how can we continue to deliver those experiences to consumers in a way that ensures that we can recoup that investment and achieve an appropriate level of revenue by maintaining the value of the content, while ensuring that the content we’re delivering is of value to the consumer.”

“I guess one thing that I would say is that we have personally experienced of course that even though entertainment is a thing that one can enjoy on their own, it becomes much more fun when you are enjoying it together with others, friends or family. And that it becomes easier for that entertainment to reach a broader audience when it’s designed to do that, and we’ve got a lot of evidence that suggests this. One of the reasons that we put such a focus on things like StreetPass and local play is because we’ve felt that it adds a tremendous amount of value to our entertainment, and we’ve seen this time and again.”

“One thing that we have found over the years is that video games themselves are a thing that have a tendency to be difficult for them to break out of a particular segment, or a particular group, or a particular group of people with particular interests. But what we have found with some of our most successful products, is that they tend to be ones where people are playing them together and the communication is spreading much more broadly and more easily than standard word of mouth communication. And what you start to see is people of different generations playing together and talking with each other, and sometimes you even see grandchildren talking with their grandparents about a video game. And when the game itself is one that reaches across those different age groups, then you see situations where different people are talking about it together and learning from one another different things about the game. And we feel that these types of properties in games that we’ve created have brought many new people into the industry and been a great contribution to the video game industry as a whole.”

“And so even for example with the plans for our smart device efforts, that will also take on this theme of giving people opportunities to learn from one another about games, and giving games an opportunity to spread across different generations of people, and give people more opportunity to communicate with one another about games.”

On the inception of Super Smash Bros. during Iwata’s tenure at HAL Laboratories, and the original idea for Amiibo

“If you recall, I used to work at HAL Laboratories, and I was there at the time that they were working on the original Super Smash Bros. for the N64. And the individual who was responsible for localization of that Smash Bros. games is the individual who is translating for me now, which is Bill Trinen. But what’s interesting about the Smash Bros. games, is that the Smash Bros. games do not represent the Nintendo characters fighting against one another, they actually represent toys of Nintendo characters getting into an imaginary battle amongst themselves. And frankly that has to do with a very serious debate that we had within the company back then, which was, ‘Is it really okay for Nintendo characters to be hitting other Nintendo characters? Is it okay for Mario to be hitting Pikachu?'”

“Of course now Smash Bros. is such an obvious thing to be in existence than most people forget that that type of a debate was something that had to happen when the original game was created. And so the idea at that time was that, we already knew that there were going to be 50 characters playable in the new Smash Bros. game, which is now just released. At the time, the idea was that if we were to create a toy or a figure for each one of those characters, and if you could tap that toy to the system and have that toy interact with not just Smash Bros. but with a lot of different games, you would see very quickly that people would want to collect the toys and they would want to get the benefit of having the toys and using the toys in many different games, and that together all of that would make the overall value of the platform increase greatly for the consumers, and the value of owning the toys and the games would also increase. So that was the original idea around amiibo.”

On the Nintendo Wii and taking risks

“In the time period before Wii was called Wii and we still referred to it as Revolution, no one thought it was going to succeed. But it produced the results that it did, and it was able to do that on the back of Wii Sports, on a single software title, which changed the fate of the system. And so I think the entertainment industry is one where continually we’ve seen how a single product can determine the future of a product or company, and that’s where I think us being able to devote all of our Kyoto craftsmanship to creating our products is where people can look forward to what’s coming from us in the future.”

On Nintendo’s iconic IP and wooing third parties

“Nintendo is a company that’s in a very unique position, in that we are both a platform holder, a console manufacturer and we are a strong content provider with very strong IP. The basic underlying principle is that when we are able to showcase the value and the appeal of our software titles, then people see the value and appeal of our hardware. And that’s how we build momentum and we sustain that momentum, and it’s when we’ve built that momentum then that the third-party publishers are excited to join in and support us.”

“But when we have a situation like we have with Wii U, when the hardware is not reaching a suitable level of sales, then it’s harder for the third parties to come and support the platform, and that is when we have to rely more heavily on our first-party production, and we’ve experienced this at times in the past as well. So one approach that we take with that is an approach similar to Hyrule Warriors, where what we’ve done is we’ve taken one of our very strong IP and we’ve combined it with a strong gameplay system from an outside publisher and provided that on our platform as a way to continue to provide additional offerings to our consumers.”

“By leveraging our first-party studios to drive the appeal of both our software and our hardware, we’re then able to lay the foundation for the third parties to be able to do a meaningful business on our platforms. So as we go forward, going forward with the intent of trying to achieve that momentum and that foundation sooner. We achieved it with both Wii and DS, but it wasn’t there at the beginning. The third-party support for both of those systems came, but they weren’t there right at the beginning. And so we need to have the mentality of quickly establishing the appeal and that initial install base to make it easier for the third parties to come and support our systems earlier.”

On designing resonant, easily grasped entertainment experiences

“We’re constantly creating prototypes, many of which never see the light of day, but those prototypes, they come in a very wide variety, and they represent varying forms and varying systems and varying structures, so anything is possible. Ideally what I would like to see us do is, choose an approach that doesn’t require a lot of explanation, and is something that people can understand quickly at first glance. Ultimately we’re an entertainment company and we make entertainment products, but if it takes a lot of explanation for people to understand your entertainment product, you’re doing something wrong. So I don’t know when we’ll be able to show you something, but I hope that when we do Matt, you’ll reflect on our conversation today and you’ll say ‘A-ha, I got it!'”

Why Nintendo President Satoru Iwata Mattered

He was one of the few gaming execs with hands-on experience

+ READ ARTICLE

Nintendo President and CEO Satoru Iwata has died at only 55 years old after battling cancer for over a year. His unexpected passing marks the end of a wildly inventive and broadly celebrated 13-year stretch helming the iconic Kyoto video games company.

Iwata, born in Sapporo, Japan in 1959, was only the fourth person to lead Nintendo since its inception as a playing card company in 1889, and the first president unrelated to the founding Yamauchi family. His ascent to the topmost Nintendo position in 2002 was unusual as it followed a career in software engineering, making him one of the industry’s only corporate luminaries with substantial hands-on game creation experience.

In an exclusive interview with TIME this spring — Iwata’s last with a Western media outlet — he talked about how personally involved he remained in helping drive and evaluate the company’s hallmark unorthodox inventions. He called Nintendo “a company of Kyoto craftsman” and joked “this is where my background in technology is quite helpful, because it means that the engineers can’t trick me.”

At Tokyo-based Nintendo affiliate HAL Laboratory during the 1980s and 90s, Iwata helped develop some of Nintendo’s most memorable games. That list includes Super Smash Bros. for the Nintendo 64, the opening salvo in a critically lauded and financially lucrative fighting series starring Nintendo characters like Mario and Donkey Kong that’s since sold in the tens of millions for the company. After he was promoted to president of HAL Laboratory in 1993, he continued to work personally on the company’s products, including several titles in Nintendo’s wildly popular Pokémon series.

Iwata’s move to Nintendo came in 2000, when he assumed management of the company’s corporate planning division. Just two years later, then-Nintendo President Hiroshi Yamauchi, who had helmed the company since 1949, decided to retire, allowing Iwata to step in and steer Nintendo through its most inventive period yet.

It was under Iwata that Nintendo ushered in the Nintendo DS, a dual-screen gaming handheld that succeeded the popular Game Boy, eventually going on to challenge Sony for the title of “bestselling games platform of all time.” Nintendo’s wildly successful Wii, now arguably the most recognizable video game system in the industry’s history, arrived in 2006, another Iwata-led gamble that paid incredible dividends following the company’s lackluster GameCube, which launched in 2001. And while Iwata’s critics often accused the company of reacting too slowly to industry trends, Iwata wasn’t afraid to enact radical change: after years of financial downturns (exacerbated by the company’s poorly received Wii U game console), he unveiled plans this March to develop games for smartphones and tablets. The world will now remember Iwata as the Nintendo leader who tore down the wall between the company’s heavily guarded iconic IP and non-Nintendo platforms.

But it was Iwata’s playful, almost mischievous and refreshingly candid personal style that so endeared him to the company’s fans. In 2011, he helped launch a video series dubbed Nintendo Direct, personally emceeing the company’s biggest surprises, often with quirky framing twists, like an effects-laden mock kung-fu brawl with Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aimé for E3 2014. At Nintendo’s E3 2015 presentation last month, he appeared as a Muppet designed by The Jim Henson Company.

Iwata’s other significant public relations innovation was “Iwata Asks,” a remarkable series in which Iwata interviewed members of Nintendo’s many development teams, delving into the anecdotal history of some of the company’s best loved projects. It was a Nintendophile’s dream come true.

Above all, Iwata established and maintained a decorous tone often at odds with his competitors. In lieu of visually splashy, clamorous stage-led events at annual game shows, Iwata chose charmingly simple, almost dignified presentational vignettes. When fans responded negatively to a new Nintendo idea, Iwata’s reaction was often swift and direct: after an upcoming Nintendo DS game built on a hallowed Nintendo franchise was waved off by fans at E3 last month, Iwata tweeted his thanks to fans for their feedback and promised to meet their expectations.

Iwata’s health problems were first aired just before E3 in June 2014, when Iwata, who had been planning to attend the show (I was scheduled to meet with him), mysteriously backed out. At the time, Nintendo said Iwata’s doctors had warned him against travel, but didn’t say why. A few weeks later, the company disclosed Iwata was battling cancer, specifically a tumor in his bile duct. At that point he’d had surgery, and his prospects sounded hopeful because the doctors had apparently found the tumor early. When he resumed appearing in Nintendo Direct videos following E3, he was clearly thinner, but seemed otherwise unfazed. Though he again missed this year’s E3, he remained publicly active to the end, participating in Nintendo’s last shareholder meeting just a few weeks ago.

When I spoke with Mr. Iwata by phone for TIME’s story on the company this spring, he sounded his normal, puckish self, answering my questions with upbeat and insightful remarks. He laughed often, and had the rest of us chuckling as well. Iwata had a knack for making interviewers feel at ease, mostly because he knew how to answer even the questions he wasn’t allowed to with an apologetic sincerity lost on most corporate leaders. And he always had something interesting to add, usually an amusing or revealing anecdote. He’ll be rightly remembered for all the triumphs listed above and more, but it was his warmth and affability when engaging with strangers that I’ll remember most.

Go look for book, film or music news, and you’ll probably wind up scouring Google’s aggregation tool. There, filed neatly under “Entertainment,” you’ll find stories about George R.R. Martin’s Winds of Winter, the first chapter of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, and teasers for the upcoming Ghostbusters film reboot or the Sherlock TV series’ 2015 Christmas special.

But news about Bethesda’s sprawling new post-apocalyptic roleplaying opus Fallout 4? “Zombies” mode in Call of Duty: Black Ops 3? The latest scuttlebutt about Nintendo’s upcoming “NX” console? You’ll have to swing over to “Technology.”

Sure, “Entertainment’s” also thronged with gossip about donut-licking pop music idols and tawdry celebrity shenanigans—hardly distinguished company. But the message is implicit: books, movies and music are “Arts,” while games are…something else.

Indeed, games are something else. Print books are migrating to e-readers and films plus music are now artifacts we can summon magically from our phones. But shifts in gaming are comparably tectonic. Game design is fueled by reality control fantasies, and interface recalibration over time is in its DNA. Think arcade cabinets, home computers, devoted consoles and handhelds, and now smartphones and tablets. Think about Nintendo and the Wii. Think about Oculus and its wraparound VR headset. Think about the point at which true virtual reality arrives.

Games are lashed to technological momentum’s mast, in other words, driven as much by revolutions in the semiconductor industry as revelatory design ideas. Books and movies don’t undergo motion control upheavals, or have elaborate Early Access programs whereby players can significantly influence development. Scanning music tracks (play, skip ahead, skip behind) in today’s streaming apps still works basically the same as punching buttons on boomboxes and Sony Walkmans did decades ago. Games, by contrast, occupy the space between those older, staid categories.

Sticking games in “Technology” has consequences. The filter reinforces stereotypes of technology as cold, clinical, sterile—ultimately apart from the artful or sublime. It frustrates gaming’s slouch toward basic validation as a legitimate art form (beyond its ivory tower acolytes).

So it’s with surprise and pleasure that I’m discovering Apple’s new “News” app, found in its just released iOS 9 beta, files game stories under “Entertainment” and not “Technology.” That, given how long games have labored under Google and Yahoo’s domineering framework, feels huge.

Apple News, in case you’re just hearing about it, brings Cupertino’s graceful form-and-function balancing act to story curation on the iPhone and iPad. Launch it, and it’ll ask that you select preferred media outlets before folding your choices into a stream with elegantly feng shui’d headlines and body text. Tap on “Explore,” and you can alternately browse by categories like “Food,” “Politics,” “Science” and so on. It’s all pretty standard fare.

But click “Entertainment,” and you’ll find channels for Vanity Fair, Billboard, Complex, Vulture…and Polygon. The latter is a games-slash-gaming-culture site. In the historical echelons of news curators like Google, Yahoo and now Apple, Polygon’s divorce from “Technology” (the sites stories still appear in the latter category on Google News) is kind of groundbreaking.

That said, the move feels tentative. There’s a “Browse Topics” section below “Browse Channels,” for instance, that includes categories like “Performing arts,” “Books and literature,” and “Pop music,” but nothing generalist for games, say an “Interactive entertainment” search. And Polygon, as far as I can tell, is all there is for game channels at this point. Where’s Kill Screen? Offworld? Quarter to Three?

Assuming Polygon’s filing under “Entertainment” was intentional, my hat’s off to Apple for boldly leading here. I just hope we’re seeing the tip of an iceberg, as opposed to an errant ice cube.

Apple’s iOS 9 is still in beta, of course, so everything could change. Call it a metaphor for where we’re at culturally, weighing gaming as a technology-driven or technology-transcendent medium, and still, clearly, in beta mode.

Microsoft’s New Halo 5 App Is Finally on iPhone and Android

The Halo franchise's news and video portal is finally available for iOS and Android devices.

The Halo Channel app is Microsoft’s portal to all things Halo, from news and community activities to video vignettes like The Sprint and The Bulletin. It’s been available since last year, but only on Xbox One, Windows PCs and Windows tablets, which in today’s app-verse means it’s been living on something like a backwater planet.

That changes now: Microsoft just rolled out iOS and Android versions of its Halo-filled portal, and says a Windows Phone version should be available by the time Windows 10 arrives on July 29.

What’s more, if you download the app and watch a video–any will suffice–you’ll unlock a “unique Promotional REQ pack,” which includes an emblem for use in Halo 5: Guardians when the game ships on October 27.

The app’s not showing up in Apple App Store searches yet, so I haven’t been able to fiddle with it, but here’s hoping these new versions fare better than the Xbox One implementation, afflicted with bouts of hair-tearing sluggishness.